UX Quotes

Product Quotes

“The more we listen to and try to understand what are clients/users are looking for, we can refine our products, and processes in an effort to keep them engaged, and appeal to potential users and clients. With our users in mind and the right vision we can plan, and develop successful applications that don’t fade, because they are based on user needs, not trends.” – Aaron Irizarry (source)

“The problems that products are designed to solve require the use of many design disciplines. Some of these design efforts work directly at the user’s interaction while others are employed to address the business’ bottom line. But all of these design considerations affect, and sometimes create, an intended experience for the product… I encourage us change our discourse to include the idea of a product experience, instead of the experience that only deals with the user.” – Andrew Crow (source)

“Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.” – Bill Buxton (source)

“Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.” – Dan Brown (source)

“Doing a great job, playing a significant role in your company’s success, and providing ongoing value is about delivering great user experiences. It’s about how your work can add real value for both the business and the people who use your products… It’s about how you can keep design in focus.” – Daniel Szuc (source)

“We don’t spend enough time up front on projects discussing, assessing, defining and refining the value of what we make. We jump too quickly into design and build before applying rigor to what we make. It’s easy to get lost in the product detail: a screen, code and forget what the product’s value is and who you are building it for. Everything we do should be to help move the product a little closer to success.” – Daniel Szuc (source)

“To me it’s very hard to make your customers happy if you’re not happy yourself. That has to start from within. You have to be happy with the work you’re doing, happy with the products that you’re producing in order to really truly make your customers happy. It’s very much a positive feedback cycle. When you like what you do, you’re going to create something that’s better than if you don’t like what you do. All things being equal, your customers are going to like you and your product a lot more.” – David Heinemeier Hansson (source)

“Deeply understanding their customers is what allows successful companies to think five years ahead of the market and develop products and services that revolutionize the way we live our lives… By understanding the market and the needs of their customers, these companies can develop products customers want and put themselves in the best position to achieve success.” – Demetrius Madrigal (source)

“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service -from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly. That’s systems thinking.” – Don Norman (source)

“If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense -the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product’s components.” – Don Norman (source)

“Products were once designed for the functions they performed. But when all companies can make products that perform their functions equally well, the distinctive advantage goes to those who provide pleasure and enjoyment while maintaining the power. If functions are equated with cognition, pleasure is equated with emotion; today we want products that appeal to both cognition and emotion.” – Don Norman (source)

“Products were once designed for the functions they performed. But when all companies can make products that perform their functions equally well, the distinctive advantage goes to those who provide pleasure and enjoyment while maintaining the power. If functions are equated with cognition, pleasure is equated with emotion; today we want products that appeal to both cognition and emotion.” – Don Norman (source)

“Storytelling offers a way for the team to really understand what they are building and the audience that they are creating it for. Stories allow for the most complex of ideas to be effectively conveyed to a variety of people. This designed product/experience can then offer meaning and emotion for its users.” – Francisco Inchauste (source)

“Products that are well designed have value beyond necessity: The defining feature of a great product isn’t its power, its size, its speed, or its novelty. We value things according to the quality of the experience we have when we use them… A great product doesn’t just do its job; it does something more.” – Harold Hambrose (source)

“A startup founder who ‘gets’ user experience and design will likely create a more successful product than one who does not. It’s not just because a great user experience makes a product more enjoyable and ultimately fun to use. It’s because this type of design thinking and understanding of the customer seeps into every other aspect of the product.” – Jeff Gothelf (source)

“What I get to do is take that insight into how people think and how people behave and turn it into something, a product or a service, that is going to make their lives better. It’s going to improve their lives in some way that they may not even be able to articulate. To be able to make some small part of their experience better, and all of those little experiences add up to the sum of somebody’s life… the ability to touch people in that way is really profound.” – Jesse James Garrett (source)

“What makes people passionate, pure and simple, is great experiences. If they have great experience with your product [and] they have great experiences with your service, they’re going to be passionate about your brand, they’re going to be committed to it. That’s how you build that kind of commitment.” – Jesse James Garrett (source)

“Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of ‘I can’ than ‘I should’… Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That’s ‘I can’ thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces… But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device… focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can.” – John Maeda (source)

“Users don’t care about convention and heuristics and all of that. Users just want to have a good experience achieving the outcomes they set out to achieve in your site/system/product. Surely we, as experience designers, can not only design a non-problematic experience. Surely we can actually create a pleasurable experience through the way that people interact with our content or functionality.” – Leisa Reichelt (source)

“As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.” – Peter Morville (source)

“Successful businesspeople in all fields endeavor to understand that they are in the business of designing a total customer experience. We call this the customer experience supply chain. The physical product or service is a central part–but, alone, not a sufficient part–of the equation for lasting success. Design is everyone’s job. Doing good design takes more than good designers. It takes a commitment from everybody in the company–soup to nuts, end to end.” – Robert Brunner (source)

“The most common misperception is the word ‘design’. People think of primarily pretty pictures or forms. They don’t understand the depth to which design goes–not only in products, but in every aspect of our life. Whether it is the design of a program, a product or some form of communication, we are living in a world that’s totally designed. Somebody made a decision about everything. And it was a design decision.” – Sam Farber (source)

“The secret to designing an intuitive user experience is making sure that the conceptual model of your product matches, as much as possible, the mental models of your users. If you get that right you will have created a positive and useful user experience.” – Susan Weinschenk (source)

“I view a user experience as a conversation between people separated over the distance of time. At one end of that conversation are those who create the product; at the other, the people who use it. In between is the product itself–with a design that either helps or hinders; creates a barrier-free interaction or shouts in an unfamiliar language. Because this conversation does not happen in real time, we are not there to smooth over the rough spots and make sure that we have spoken clearly. Instead, we have to build our understanding of those users into every aspect of the design, by putting people–users–at the center of the design process.” – Whitney Quesenbery (source)